Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.0

Baron Blood Blu-ray Movie Review

A so-so gothic thriller from Italy's b-movie horror maven.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater November 29, 2012

Mario Bava's place in cinema history is safely secured. He shot nearly forty Italian features as cinematographer before making his breakthrough solo directorial debut, the sublime chiller Black Sunday, which bridged the gap between the cobweb-hung romanticism of the 1930s Universal monster movies and the more violent, psychosexual strain of horror to come. With 1964's Blood and Black Lace, he practically invented the conventions of the giallo sub-genre of "spaghetti thriller" proto-slasher movies—the garish lighting, the stalker wearing leather gloves, the Crayola-red viscera—and his very name evokes a particular brand of budget-stretching Italian moviemaking.

That's not to say he didn't churn out more than a few thoroughly mediocre pictures. Baron Blood—or Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga—is definitely one of them. Made in 1972, when the giallo craze was at its peak, the film is something of a self-conscious throwback to the crumbling gothicism of Black Sunday, albeit with a more modern setting and plenty of the expected bloodshed. It's not quite a slasher, and not entirely a foggy chiller in the Hammer Horror mold, sitting instead in some tonal netherworld in-between.

Antonio Cantafora stars as Peter Kleist, an American student who's just finished up a master's degree and is excited to take some time off to—as he puts it—"get back to the earth, get back to my roots." In particular, he's fascinated by "that ghoulish baron" on his father's side, so he boards a 747 bound for Austria, hoping to explore his ancestral homeland and learn more about the dreadful Otto von Kleist—a.k.a. Baron Blood—a Vlad the Impaler- style medieval warlord who terrorized the villagers and hung his enemies on pikes from his castle's walls. Peter's uncle, Karl (Massimo Girotti), greets him at the airport and takes him to this impressive old manor, where the local mayor, Herr Dortmeunt (Deiter Tressler), and his sexy young mini-skirt wearing assistant, Eva (Elke Sommer), are completing renovations to turn the castle into a tourist trap.

Bava makes some slight satirical jabs at the very idea of this; after all, no revered architectural wonder should have a Coca-Cola machine inside. Shooting on location in and around the Burg Kreuzenstein castle—which was also featured in 1993's The Three Musketeers and, most recently, in the 2011 Nicholas Cage dud, Season of the Witch—the director uses the authentic environs well, taking us and his characters through cavernous dungeons, creepy corridors, and foggy, cobblestone back alleyways. If nothing else, Bava certainly knew how to get production value bang for his buck.

It's fortunate that Baron Blood has such innate atmosphere, because the plot is a drawn-out, convoluted, and ultimately underwhelming series of been-done-to-death-before events. Peter has brought along an old parchment manuscript he found in his grandfather's papers, and it contains an incantation—written by a witch the Baron had burned at the stake—that will supposedly bring Otto von Kleist back from the grave. (Why? So that the descendants of his victims can have revenge...again. Or, something. I dunno, exactly.) Thinking he'll scare Eva into his arms, they go to the castle at midnight to read the spell, but—you guessed it—they actually succeed in resurrecting the long-dead feudal lord.

We never get too good of a look at the zombified Baron Blood—Bava mostly keeps him in silhouette, or in the shadows, draped in a long cloak and wearing a broad-brimmed hat—but we definitely see his handiwork as he slays a doctor, a groundskeeper, and a few other unfortunate souls. There's an especially brutal hanging scene that's well shot and edited, along with one of Bava's characteristic Iron Maiden kills. There are several obvious call- backs here to Black Sunday—a vengeful witch, a long-dormant curse, well-off ancestors of nobility, iron spikes punching holes in flesh—so many, in fact, that the film almost feels like the low-budget gothic Italian horror equivalent of Ridley Scott revisiting the Alien universe with Prometheus. It's essentially Mario Bava returning to the genre/story that made him famous.

Baron Blood, however, is nowhere near as stylish or as suspenseful as Bava's first film, a true genre classic. The movie's color cinematography is simply no match for the gorgeously stark monochrome of Black Sunday, and its overlong middle section is bogged down by a subplot with The Third Man's Joseph Cotton—what's he doing here?—slumming against type as an entrepreneur who wants to return the castle to its original, fear-inducing state. You know how at the end of each Scooby-Doo episode the gang unmasks the ghoul to reveal that it's just some crooked businessman? Well, Baron Blood is the exact opposite of that, with the crooked businessman revealed to be an honest-to-goodness supernatural ghoul. This might've made a nice twist had Vincent Fotre's script held off on the reveal, but we're clued in long before the characters are, nullifying any sense of suspense. If the plot is dull, and comparable to just about every other haunted castle b-movie from the '60s and '70s, at least Bava orchestrates a few memorable horror set pieces, including a nighttime chase through the empty village and a wicked, revenant-filled climax that has the violent Baron reaping exactly what he's sown.

Baron Blood Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Don't be entirely put off by Baron Blood's exceptionally grimy title sequence, which is covered in heavy specks and what appears to be two separate layers of grain—from the background image and the foreground titles—interposed harshly on top of one another. I promise, it gets better. At least, somewhat better. The film's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer—taken from an original 35mm negative—is certainly an improvement over prior DVD editions, but this is, has been, and always will be a soft, grubby-looking b-movie from Italy's low-budget horror king. Even in tight closeups, the image is never tightly resolved, with fuzzy textures and distinct lack of truly fine detail. This isn't Kino-Lorber's fault; it's just the inherent quality of the lenses, film stock, and lighting used by Bava and his crew. For the most part, the encode itself seems entirely true to source. There's no grain-erasing noise reduction here, no blatant edge enhancement, and—beyond some fleeting banding during the scene where Eva runs through the fog—no overt compression issues. There's been no restorative digital clean-up either, so you'll definitely spot small scratches and flecks of debris throughout, but this does give the semi-satisfying illusion that you're watching an authentically beat-up print projected live. Color is reproduced well, with no major fluctuations or thinness, and contrast seems accurate, neither too punched up nor noticeably flat.

Baron Blood Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Like the picture quality, Baron Blood's uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 track has its share of age and budget-related issues, but nothing unexpected from this kind of gothic b-horror 1970s fare. There's a low but perceptible background hiss that runs through most of the film, a few pops and crackles, and dialogue that—while always comprehensible—can occasionally sound thick and slightly muffled. Also, like most Italian-made movies from the period, the dubbing is fairly obvious much of the time. All that aside, there are no real issues here—no channels cutting out, no weird volume fluctuations, no abrasive peaking. The music by Stelvio Ciprani—who had previously scored Bava's Twitch of the Death Nerve—is unsurprisingly a bit thin, dynamically, but never brittle or harsh. Overall, a listenable, faithful-to-source mix. Do note that while the film is in English, there are no subtitle options on the disc whatsoever for those who might need or want them.

Baron Blood Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary: Tim Lucas, author of Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark, delivers an unsurprisingly well-researched commentary track, covering the backstory of the film's production, the location scouting, the relationship between Bava and producer Alfredo Leone, and the numerous homages Bava made in Baron Blood to other movies and even his own previous films.
• Italian Title Sequences (HD, 2:28, 2:05): Includes the opening and closing titles for the film's Italian release.
• Italian and English Theatrical Trailers (HD, 3:15, 2:24)
• Three Radio spots (audio only, 00:59, 00:29, 00:29)
• Mario Bava Trailers: Trailers for Black Sunday, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Lisa and the Devil, The House of Exorcism.

Baron Blood Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's not nearly the best film in Italo-horror auteur Mario Bava's body of work—that honor would go to Black Sunday or his early influential gialli— but Baron Blood still has its cult fans, who can get past the film's played-out story and appreciate the director's lira-stretching style. Kino- Lorber's Blu-ray release should slake Bava's bloodthirsty followers, with a new high definition transfer that's a solid upgrade from the DVD, and an informative commentary track by Tim Lucas, author of Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark.